From its simple beginnings as a broad network for exchanging information among scientists and researchers, the Internet and World Wide Web (Web) have grown into an integral and essential part of various aspects of personal and business existence. Advancing technology has helped transform the Internet from simple text based information, to a vast array of rich visual and interactive user experiences. In order to create this visual content, designers and developers use a variety of software tools.
In a typical workflow for web designers, the images, which will eventually be displayed in web content, are designed using specialized graphical development environments, such as Adobe Systems Incorporated's PHOTOSHOP® and FIREWORKS®, and the like. The resulting images are typically stored to a compression format such as PHOTOSHOP® Document (PSD), Portable Network Graphics (PNG), Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), a low-compression Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), or the like. These original source graphics files are intended to maintain a great amount of detail for the designed images. Therefore, because of bandwidth restrictions and guidelines for adequate loading times, these original source files are impractical for use directly in the code defining the web page or web application. Typically, web designers will use the original source files to create web images in a format that is more compatible with web display, such as higher compression JPEGs, GIFs, or the like. Using web-optimized file formats helps to maintain efficient loading of the web images onto the users' browser windows.
Another technique generally used by web designers is to take only a portion of the original source file for an image and create some modified version of that image for the web file. For example, the original image source file may contain an image of an automobile. However, the web designer only wants an image of a license plate on a bumper for the web page under design. In order to generate this web image, the designer would convert the original source file into a web-optimized file format and insert this web image onto the design view of a web development environment (WDE), such as Adobe Systems Incorporated's DREAMWEAVER® and GOLIVE®, Microsoft Corporation's FRONT PAGE®, or the like. Many WDEs provide a dialog window that opens the original source file of the image and presents a number of options to the designer to select to determine how the designer would like the source file to be processed into the web image file. For example, the dialog may allow the designer to select the compression format, the type of compression, and possibly any filtering that the designer would like to use. When the designer is satisfied with his or her selections, he or she will select to insert the image file into the web page under development. This selection to insert would execute a conversion component to generate a new image file for the web image by converting the original source image file according to the designer's selections.
The image will then be displayed by the WDE on the design canvas and associated with a new web image file in the selected format. By working in the design view of the WDE, the designer may then apply a cropping feature to the web image which cuts out and deletes those portions of the larger image that the designer does not wish to use. In a typical crop operation, the user places a crop rectangle (a “crop rect”) onto the image and moves or shapes the crop rect to surround the area of the image that the designer wishes to keep. Upon executing the crop function, the WDE deletes all image data outside of the perimeter of the user-positionable crop rect and resaves the file representing the web image which now only includes the data from inside the crop rect. The cropped web image can now be manipulated further as the designer wishes.
As with other design endeavors, the designer may make a mistake with the cropped web image or may change his or her mind with regard to how the image has been modified or the amount of the original image that he or she desires to use in the resulting web page. For instance, maybe the designer would rather use an image of the license plate on an automobile that includes the image of the auto's headlamp, or, perhaps, the designer may not be satisfied with a particular result of a filter that has been used on the web image data. Because the WDE operates directly on the web image file, the designer typically is forced to delete the web image completely and start over from the original source file. While this restarting process may not be that inconvenient to the designer if the designer only needs to restart a few times, if the designer is making detailed modifications or applying complex filters to the web image, he or she may need to restart often in order to obtain just the desired effect. This restarting process, then, can be quite inconvenient and cost a great deal of design time, which costs the designer money and efficiency.